Description
Book SynopsisChinese Sympathies examines how EuropeansGerman-speaking writers and thinkers in particularidentified with Chinese intellectual and literary traditions following the circulation of Marco Polo''s Travels. This sense of affinity expanded and deepened, Daniel Leonhard Purdy shows, as generations of Jesuit missionaries, baroque encyclopedists, Enlightenment moralists, and translators established intellectual regimes that framed China as being fundamentally similar to Europe.
Analyzing key German literary textstheological treatises, imperial histories, tragic dramas, moral philosophies, literary translations, and poetic cyclesChinese Sympathies traces the paths from baroque-era missionary reports that accommodated Christianity with Confucianism to Goethe''s concept of world literature, bridged by Enlightenment debates over cosmopolitanism and sympathy, culminating in a secular principle that allowed readers to identify meaningful si
Trade Review
Anyone who is interested in transcultural history, early modern German literary and philosophical thinking in the European context, and the discourse of world literature should find this rich book indispensable
* The German Quarterly *
Purdy tells us stories in which Europe has digested and incorporated Chinese culture and history and become deeply entangled with China. Anyone who is interested in transcultural history, early modern German literary and philosophical thinking in the European context, and the discourse of world literature should find this rich book indispensable.
* The German Quarterly *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Sympathy and Orientalism
1. Marco Polo's Fabulous Imperial Connections
2. Jesuit Channels between Europe and Asia
3. A Genealogy of Compassionate Reading
4. News of the Ming Dynasty's Collapse
5. Vondel's Tragic Chinese Emperor
6. Wieland's Secret History of Cosmopolitanism
7. Adam Smith and the Chinese Earthquake
8. Goethe Reads the Jesuits
9. Chinese-German Pairings
10. World Literature and Goethe's Chinese Poetry
